Prepare, organise, assess and communicate. The safer you can stay whilst bouldering, the more you get to climb, and the more motivated you are to get out and push yourself.

Perhaps one of the most energising things in climbing, is getting off a plane to sunshine and cold temperatures, and beelining straight to an area you’ve been looking forward to visiting for months or even years. But it also comes with its own big problem. How do you resist the urge to go ballistic and climb for hours on end, ruining your skin and energy for days to come?

Pacing a full day out climbing is a tricky skill, and one that not only makes a difference to the quantity of climbing you do, but the quality. Once you start to develop this skill, your climbing can really open up into a much broader experience.

Filming your climbing is perhaps one of the most misunderstood and divisive topics in modern climbing. Many people feel self-conscious recording themselves in a busy gym or crag. Others are happy to set up a tripod or constantly ask a friend to have the camera at the ready. The question becomes what is the filming for?

Projecting is undoubtedly one of my favourite things to experience in climbing. The feeling of seeing a climb go from virtually impossible to effortless is really something special. So how do we take a boulder from feeling like a concept, to standing on top?

With an acceptance that mistakes can happen, and a plan for dealing  with them, the more times you are exposed to these situations the better you become at dealing with them. You don’t feel this all consuming pressure of ‘it has to be this go’, you just react instinctively to solve the problem, and get straight back into your zone.

Mid climb internal noise is one of the most distracting and off-putting experiences you can have whilst on the wall. It is often enough to ruin great attempts on a climb, and often ruin your experience altogether. So why do these thoughts matter? And how do we start to keep them quiet whilst we focus on the job in hand?

Intuition in climbing is a bit like a 6th sense. Sometimes, stuff just works, and you have no idea how or why you thought about doing it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had a little hunch to change beta on a move, and it worked. I thought I had refined and found the optimal way for a move, but in some fleeting moment, my brain told me to try something else. How can that be? And is it a trainable thing? Let's puzzle.

Hesitation and self-doubt whilst on the wall can be one of the most crippling things in bouldering. Knowing what a move is, and how it should be done, but not being able to do it, and taking the all too common step of dropping off or letting go. How do we get into these situations? How do they affect us? And how can we re-wire a little bit to avoid them? Let’s slay some demons.

The seasons, just like our climbing, are constantly changing. We are moving  between hot and cold periods in our climbing as summer moves into autumn.  Sometimes everything is going well and we are rested and firing on all cylinders; other times we feel slow, sluggish and overtrained. But that’s part of life, and part of the cycle. Our task as climbers is to read ourselves and these ‘seasons’ and know when to pivot into the next!

When Jakob Schubert flashes your project it can initially be hard to understand why you are bothering in the first place. Eliot discusses taking a step back and focusing on you, your journey and the day to day reality of chasing it.

This focus on play and bringing joy back into my climbing has given me some good breaks from projecting, and allowed me to transition nicely between phases and seasons, maintaining motivation and having a good alternative plan for when injuries or busy periods crop up.

Getting thoroughly shut down by a boulder problem is one of the most grounding aspects of bouldering. If you want to push yourself and improve, dealing with this experience is one of the most important responses you’ll have to make in your climbing career. So how do you respond? 

There is still a misconception amongst climbers that slab has very little transfer to steeper forms of climbing. I have found this to be demonstrably untrue, in that some of the best climbers I know, all excel on a slab. But why? What skills that they have honed on slab, translate to steeper climbing? Let’s try and step into it… 

Climbing is certainly not a game of inches, it’s a game of millimetres. We have possibly more possibilities and orientations available to us on rock climbs than perhaps any other sport. So with all of these possibilities available to us, how do we find the key that unlocks the door?

Forgetting beta is one of the most common yet avoidable mistakes that climbers make. It’s all too easy to have a sequence decided upon, refined and prepared only to miss a little piece of the puzzle, where it all falls apart.

I knew straight away from the first day I climbed on a piece of rock, that I would be a climber. The movement, the adventure, the physical challenge. But can you go too far? Is there a price to chasing performance that should not be paid? I’ll try and provide some opinion and give you some ideas for exploring your own relationship with climbing.  

How do we dodge the trap of comparison to others, and relentless chasing of the next number and interact with grades in a way that’s sustainable and motivating? 

Knowing when to stick or twist is one of the most difficult things to do in projecting, especially when it’s something you’re obsessed with.

It’s often expected that bouldering outside will have us stress free and without a care in the world. We’ll be out climbing and enjoying nature on our own and totally loving every minute of it. The reality is often quite different.